February | 2011 | Moving to St. Croix

As the title (I know, cliche) might suggest to some, we are in fact moving upward. Work on the roof began this week. Yay! It was supposed to begin last week, but for some unknown reason it didn’t begin until Tuesday. But the good news is that it has begun.

Whenever I mention to any of my friends/family in the states what it is costing us to build this house they are generally shocked. I am shocked too, but I do understand, to some extent at least, why it is so expensive. In terms of materials, nearly everything has to be shipped in. The cost of shipping is borderline ridiculous. An example: the three bundles of lumber in the two photos below came from Miami last week. I spent around $3K for this lumber. For me to get these bundles from the lumber yard in Miami to my site involves three different shippers. A local in Miami, the freight shipper from Miami to St. Croix (CaribTrans is who we are using), and the local in St. Croix to get it to the job site. Total cost of the shipping was right around $1200. Your first question is “why not just buy it locally”? And of course that is a great question. Unfortunately, even with the cost of shipping, I was still saving money. In addition, the local suppliers didn’t have quite a bit of the sizes of lumber I needed. We try to do things local when it makes sense, but most times it is just too cost prohibitive to do so.

2-16-2011 - Lumber purchased from Miami

2-15-2011 - Lumber from Miami

What else have we accomplished these past two weeks? Let me walk you through it. First we were able to get the back/ocean side garden wall up. I was a little surprised by the height of the poured walls. Not including the footers, the walls stand nearly 8 feet high, with half of that being above ground. This wall isn’t moving, it is solid. The original design called for a gate in the middle, but since we are keeping much of the sea grape the gate would end up opening right into it. So we shifted the gate to the one side.

2-14-2011 - Garden Wall Footings

2-15-2011 - Garden Wall Forms

2-18-2011 - Garden Wall Forms - Ready to be poured

2-18-2011 - Garden Wall Being Poured

2-22-2011 - Garden Wall

In addition we decided to take advantage of the space underneath the office to use as storage, so we put in a small opening for a door and poured a floor under there.

2-14-2011 - Under-Office Storage

We also poured the slab/floor for the guest bathroom and the office. This puts us at nearly 200 yards of concrete used so far. Shortly after the office wall forms started going up.

2-16-2011 - Guest Bath Plumbing

2-19-2011 - Guest Bath and Office Floor

As mentioned above, the rafters started going up for the roof over the master.

2-22-2011 - Roof work begins

2-23-2011

And finally, a few random photos.

Our Beach

Bird and Moon

View from a friend's home

A fairly productive two weeks I suppose. We now have walls on the master side of the house and the support walls are in place under the office and guest bath. We have roofing lumber arriving on Monday from Miami so the roofers will start immediately on getting the roof framed on the master side. The idea is to have the work staggered so that both the concrete and roofing crews can stay busy at the same time.

During these past two weeks we also received some rather shocking invoices from our contractor that we believed to be part of the contract we have with him but he doesn’t feel that they are. I think we have come to an understanding but time will tell.

We are hoping that all the stresses we are experiencing in building this house will be worth it. Part of my doubts were erased the moment I walked in to check out the view from our newly formed master bedroom. Ahhh, some of that stress went right out this window.

2-11-2011 - Master Bedroom

The photo above is where we are today. Below are some of the photos leading up to this one.

2-3-2011 - Walls - All the electrical/plumbing conduit and window blocks must be in place prior to pouring the walls.

2-4-2011 - Emily and the dogs checking on the progress

2-7-2011 - Exteriro wall forms now going up

2-7-2011 - Exterior wall forms now going up

2-9-2011 - Walls formed, ready to be poured. This is the master "wing". Yes, "wing" sounds pretentious but I am unsure what else to call it. The "wing" consists of the bedroom, bath, closet/dressing area, and exercise room.